


pitch and flame

by twinagonies



Category: Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, Corporate Espionage, Fake/Pretend Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-03
Updated: 2015-07-03
Packaged: 2018-04-05 13:39:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4181880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twinagonies/pseuds/twinagonies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the MCU AU Fest.</p><p>A wholly unnecessary fake boyfriend/espionage fic, in which connections are missed, they get together by getting out, and we are what we do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	pitch and flame

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Brenda](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Brenda/gifts).



They’re standing toe to toe, breath intermingling. The closet presses in, dark and small. It would be intimate, would be, except their whispered conversation runs heated with a hint of panic.

“What do you mean, you can’t get it out,” Steve hisses.

“I can’t,” Bucky says. “The leaks mean higher security, especially on new hires. They have me under surveillance, day and night, for the first six months.”

It’s a setback, but not impassible.

“Give it to me, I’ll get it out,” Steve says. The problematic flash drive sits beside them on shelf.

Bucky shakes his head. “Nope, not as a messenger you won’t.”

Steve scrubs his face with a hand. “Ok, then, what do you suggest.”

The ceiling must have answers, since it’s where Bucky ends up staring.

“Listen, I got nothing. Thus the radio silence. I was trying to find a drop system, on the lower floor, to bypass current security measures, but it came to nothing. And now you’re here, so.”

“Course I’m here. Hill got worried.”

“Never had this problem with Nat. She knew what silence meant.”

Steve shakes his head, frustrated. “Well, you asked for me, for whatever reason.” Bucky pushes back, startled; he’s never seen Steve get snippy before.

“So I’m the idiot here?”

The blood in the closet heats up. They fume at each other; they bristle, agitated.

“You know what?” Steve’s patience stretches long, but it’s been a day, such a day, and his will can only hold it thin so long. The radio silence stretches long, but it’s been a day, such a day, and his will can only hold it thin so long. The radio silence had held out too many days, and Steve got jumpy.

“What.” Bucky’s flat voice challenges, smolders. They’ve never argued before, never had a cause to argue, and the confusion of it mixes with the tension of a paranoid situation. Steve wants to strangle him, out of frustration, maybe, or relief.

Which is when the door opens.

“Bucky?” An older man, hair prematurely white, peers into the open closet. Steve identifies him: Adrien Alman, founder and CEO of Alman Security. Mid-fifties, married only the once, currently under suspicion for selling information related to the defense of the United States to overseas buyers after a run of his clientele got hit with extortion by unknown entities.

Steve stares at him, wordless.

“Adrien,” Bucky draws out. He blushes. Steve’s never seen Bucky blush before. He didn’t know Bucky could blush.

“Bucky, what’s this? Who is this?” It’s the question, really, and Steve isn’t panicking, not yet. They can salvage this. There are possibilities here—Bucky caught Steve rifling through information, maybe, or a matter of personal extortion, something to cover their tracks.

“This is Steve,” Bucky says, and Jesus Christ, that’s his real name—great job, agent. “We needed a moment of privacy.”

“Steve?” Adrien prompts him. But Bucky’s focused on Steve, wrinkling his nose at what he’s about to say.

“Steve, my boyfriend Steve,” Bucky says. He taps Steve’s chest with the backs of his fingers. And smiles, bright as morning sunshine.

Steve’s mouth opens, as if to say, what the hell, but Bucky’s hand grabs his own. Together they present a united front.

So that’s where it starts.

+

Steve met Bucky, if it can be called a meeting, on one of the agency’s carriers. He hesitates to say met because the Soldier, as they called him then, was tortured and bloody, and half out of his mind as his body fought the withdrawal symptoms of whatever cocktail they’d kept him on for years. The Soldier’s extraction. It was Natasha’s job, her call—the Soldier her mentor, her bright friend in a dark place.

They’d worked together years now, Steve and Natasha, since Steve’s recruitment and Nat’s defection. The agency might treat Romanov like a femme fatale (to Steve’s indignation and Nat’s amusement), but Steve trusts no one else more. Not after Fury’s death, not after Pierce tried to clean house and bury both of them. And when she challenged him with a hard expression, hovering over the Soldier’s broken body like a mother bear, it’s all it took, and the agency was pulling another assassin defector into its ranks on their combined recommendation. He has her back, Natasha, and she has his.

You don’t argue with the Widow and the Captain. (For the record, Steve loathes both names.)

They respect Nat here, never more so since Hill succeeded Fury. Her quiet cajoling endears her to more than one hardened American spy. She knows when to poke, to prod, and when to back off. And best of all, she’d carved out a life for herself, outside the agency. Even got a cat, somehow, and a complication that one might even refer to as a romance, if one were being generous.

The Soldier had a harder transition, he had heard. He had been a soldier once, American military, sniper in Afghanistan, till foreign intelligence had valued his skills more than his mind, his obedience more than his will.

“I can’t tell what’s worse,” Nat had said, “to be unmade, or to never have existed in the first place.” She was rarely maudlin, and Steve took in this pensive inebriation and poured another finger of vodka, a month after she told him over a bloody traitor, “take us or leave us, but we come as pair.”

“It’s not given to us to know,” he’d said. “I read that, once.”

She had looked at him, a query in her eyes.

“We can’t know, someone else’s life.” He drank deep, liquor thick on his tongue. “We can never know what would have been. If we made different choices, who we’d be now.” If someone hadn’t made them for us, goes unsaid.

Who knew? They were, both of them, melancholic drunks.

“Jeez, Rogers, who knew you were such an oracle.”

He’d thrown a napkin at her, and the heavy moment broke like surface tension, and they grinned the grins of old friends at each other. It was the beginning of the end, for him.

+

The Soldier took the long road to becoming human, a path of winding turns and ups and down and long stretching plateaus.

There was the physical: the painful, nauseating withdrawal from a decade of benzodiazepines, the horror of amputation, the struggle of malnutrition, of beatings, of pain only the body could remember.

Three months in, they’d approached in with the specs for his arm, designed by Tony Stark, the height of technological achievement in prosthetics..

“Why would they do this,” he asked Natasha. His itsy bitsy spider, now grown and eagle-eyed and protective.

“You’re an investment,” she said. “They’ll want you as an asset, long after you want to be gone.”

“Why do you stay?” They only talked like this once, in those eighteen months. Too much could never be said.

She frowned and shrugged. “Easier to do what you know, I suppose. And I’m good at it.” She looked at him sidelong. “Besides. I meet the most interesting people.”

“And occasionally don’t kill them?”

Her close-lipped smile half-mirth, half-acceptance. “You think you’ll take it?”

“Easier than not to, I guess.”

The schematics for the arm--full metal with flesh cloaking, the whole range of senses and sensitivies and motor control--lay before them on the table. He let his head fall to her shoulder, a brief moment of touch before retreat.

And there was the mental: the diagnosis, uncomplicated PSTD; the avoidance, panic induced by water, pouring over his head. He slept cocooned in giant down comforters, ate nothing but grilled cheeses for months at a time, although he became quite adept at the gourmet grilled cheese, smoked gouda and arugula on sourdough a particular triumph.

“I know it doesn’t help now,” Dr Burke had said, “but your resilience in the face of trauma is significant. Your moods are elastic; you break yourself of destructive thought patterns before they become cyclical. In my opinion, I don’t see any barrier to a fully functional life, however you define it.”

Her steely grey eyes, her hard silver bun, her thin severe mouth, were as soothing as any creature comfort he’d found.

“Yeah, but I still can’t take a fucking shower,” he’d said.

“We get clean other ways,” she’d said. “I can recommend some nice bubble bath. And I hear epsom salts do wonders for tense muscles.”

He’d smiled despite himself, as he often had. She was pleasantly sardonic, and he found her unchanging hardness a balm to the the swift churning currents of his life.

“Maybe I’ll try it out,” he’d said.

“I’ll write you a script.” She’d barely smiled.

Eighteen months of this, of recovery and assignments and relearning the country he was born in, and there he was, still pretending to be human.

+

“Rogers, what do you need,” Hill says, voice brassy and clear over the phone.

“New cover story,” he says, unsure how to continue.

“For Barnes?”

“For me—I had to become part of his cover.”

“How so.” It had always been remarkable, how Hill could say so much, imply such grand amounts of idiocy, with a simple pair of words. While she was hyper competent at all aspects of her job, Steve secretly suspects this particular skill, the interrogator’s deadpan sarcasm, led to her promotion. He’s withstood interrogations before, and still, he finds himself scrambling for an explanation.

“I’m now Bucky’s boyfriend,” he says. “On the job.”

“Are you now.”

“Also named Steve.”

“Convenient.”

“And they check up on all his personal details, so I need some corroborating information. Evidence of a relationship.”

Her fingers tip tap away as she gets to work. “What, like used condoms.”

He chooses not to respond. He is a mature adult. Most of the time.

“Name, background, employment, residence, the works. Nothing too deep—Alman’s satisfied with the work Tony created for Barnes, seemed happy that Bucky was settled, in a personal way.” In fact, Adrien had smiled like a cat with cream after Bucky’s explanation, the strange too-strong attention of the happily coupled.

“Gotcha,” she says. The rhythm of her fingers continues, and Steve waits for a break before speaking again.

“I doubt it’ll be a large part of his cover,” he says. If it’s more to reassure himself than her, no one says so. “He’s good at the job, at least on paper, and his non-work life is well-established. I don’t think I’ll have to do more than an occasional pick-up.”

“Hmm,” she says, and he hears it coming, a deep hum of foreboding. “Nope. You’re living with him.”

He hates saying it, but it bears saying. “You’re not serious.”

“Not sure why I wouldn’t be, Steve. It’s one fewer apartment to get, one fewer lease to fabricate. A handful of doctored security tapes, and you’ve been living with him for the past month.”

“I hate shit like this,” he groans. “It’s why I’m leaving you.”

Maria laughs at him, with malicious affection. “Pack your bags, lover boy. At least your last job will be an interesting one.”

+

Bucky saved his life a few times. More than a few. Four times.

To be fair, Steve saved him right back. If they’re keeping count, it was Bucky’s four to Steve’s three.

Which shouldn’t be the case—Steve has made a career out of extraction, pulling agents out of impossible situations. Head of his own STRIKE team for years now. And somehow, Bucky’s rescued him more in the last eighteen months than he’s needed his whole life. Ridiculous.

The third time they met, Steve took a bullet to the thigh and a crow bar to the ribs. It hurt to laugh. It hurt to breathe.

“How do you feel about Vietnamese food,” Bucky saidin the back the the truck that sped them out of a firefight. “If you like, I can take you some time.”

Steve has a look, a dead-on stare that puts his men in line, a look that clearly says to anyone watching, “do not fuck with me.” For all that he’s not the most accomplished liar in the agency, Steve has a strong poker face—the deep willingness to plant his feet and never budge, incarnating itself into a face like stone. And yet, Bucky had this small, playful grin that he half-hid by ducking his head, and Steve couldn’t find the heart to shoot him down.

Or maybe it’s just the blood loss and the adrenaline (and the secret loneliness of a job with terrible overtime and erratic hours).

“Too spicy,” he wheezes out. A soft no. Everyone else gets hard no’s, but not Bucky, apparently.

+

We are what we do.

It’s something Steve’s known for a while. Why he started to pull off, pull back. Retreat, find himself, start anew. Too many people, fallen into this world, never leave. What did he have to prove? Nothing, to no one.

He’s not smooth, exactly, but he has a trustworthy face, and a trusting smile, and there’s just “something about him,” something that holds your attention while Nat pawsthrough your underwear and finds your hard drive or your work key or case full of company secrets. They were a good team, he and Nat; she could meld into shadow while he punched his way out, and if no one remembered the pretty redhead (or whatever wig she wore), all the better. He’s not a natural spy, but he’s good backup, and his truest talent has always lain in taking a group of natural liars and making them trust him.

The trick to lying is to tell the truth whenever possible. People want to believe you. People want to be seen and heard and believed. It’s easy to get cynical in a job like theirs, but Steve sees it all and accepts it all and paints and sleeps--better, if not easy.

And if he wants out, it’s because he wants to be more. Extraction was easier than espionage, at least on the mind; he hopes that life outside, life after, will continue this trend.

+

We are what we do.

And what has Bucky done? A million horrible things, unforgivable, innumerable.

What we choose to do, his therapist would correct him. Well, in that case.

To know him is hard. He knows that. The whole of his adult lifetime is wrapped in espionage, and beneath that, he’s not sure he is who he was, either. Personality is a fleeting thing, a river you can’t step in twice. The person he remembers being, before this, before he was made and made and made, is someone else entirely, someone with a wealth of charm and a dearth of cares, an excess of energy, of wanderlust, looking forward and only forward.

These days, this job, and all he seems to do is look back. What can he choose to do? Who can he choose to be? That person isn’t there anymore, isn’t available, has stopped existing as surely as anything in time.

+

His last job left him rattled. Left Nat rattled, too, a rare thing—rattled and running off on a goose chase, tracking a blonde twin, a peer, doppelgänger. The last of their kind, as the Room implodes. This job is easy shit, easy as pie, and it itches at him that he took it, no protestations. After Minsk, though, he wants easy. He wants full nights of sleep and three meals a day and clean socks and baths, baths after baths.

Maybe he’s soft now. His gun callouses have started to itch off; his reflexes less sharp. Maybe he’s losing his touch. Maybe therapy’s got something to it.

Bucky’s does what he does; he can’t say why.

+

The request—always requests, with the agency, though it had the effect of an order—came through after Nat’s taken off, with clearance, leaving a notable absence in Bucky’s support. Steve’s handled agents undercover before. Never Bucky, but that’s not a strong barrier; they have a productive working relationship, based mostly after pulling each other out of gunfire and laughing it off afterward.

The job: simple corporate espionage, a financial security office deep in Manhattan, whose clientele include the DOD, the top investment banking firms, and a few countries who may or may not have the US’s best interest in mind.  As long as you’re paying, they supply, and the worry is that information might come packaged with the security. They’re flagged for many reasons, but one in particular—the worry that the leak in his previous job had come from their information security apparatus, rather than from personnel.

Stark’s help plus a fictionalized NSA background make this Bucky a prize steal for the private sector. It’s a tight knit firm: entitled, highly competent assholes who find themselves too smart for investment banking, too good for the low status of cryptography, and too addicted to expensive suiting for underground operations. They play credit card roulette at lunchtime, and guess the $500 Scotch at happy hour. They run through the office floors yelling about Powerpoint (which inexplicably have become the dominant form of communication in the field. Building full of brilliant tech-minded twenty-somethings, and they’re all using fucking Microsoft Office). It’s infantile, if not infuriating.

At least here, the work is spreadsheets and coding, not bodies on tables.

Hill comments not at all on his request for Steve, but her expression can’t help but hint at her amusement. A funny pair, the Captain and the Soldier. The ideal and the traitor. She smiles to herself over a nice mescal when she thinks of it.

“Think you’re up for it, Cap,” Bucky said.

“What, to handle your sorry ass? Just do what I say, maybe we’ll get out alive.”

"This is how it's going to be, isn't it? You bossing me around, giving me lip."

"I'm sorry, is that not what you wanted?”

It was maybe the first time they’d met without blood on either of them.

+

So there they are. Bucky and his handler, Steve, become Bucky and his live-in boyfriend, Steve, with one chance encounter in a closet. And the office being what it was, a tight-knit, cutthroat ‘family,’ Steve’s presence was now required with all the other romantic partners. It’s certainly not the worst way to get a few flashdrives out of the office.

+

The apartment they’ve stuck Bucky in is sparse but elegant. It says nothing about the person who lives there, except maybe that they have enough money to have someone else decorate the place in blues and greys and pops of white. Bland furniture. Aggressively soothing artwork. Calming, nondescript. Nothing like Bucky at all.

Nothing like Steve, either, to be honest. But he’s used to hotels, military bases, sterile landscapes. If it’s comfort you want, this is the wrong business.

“You live close by?” Bucky says, while Steve unpacks in the guest room.

“Bed Stuy.”

Bucky nods, shuffles around behind Steve, and it’s the first awkward thing Steve’s ever seen him do. Hehides a smile.

“So, you thought more about the cover?” Steve offers.

“I had some thoughts. I’ll grab you a beer,” he says as he ducks out of the room, a polite retreat. A strange situation, though Steve’s been in stranger. He finishes unpacking. Hopes for the best.

+

It’s an office party.

One to which Steve is particularly invited. He gets a text on the burner, _office party come at 5 look nice_. He won’t admit how long he stared at that. A minimal texter, Bucky.

He’ll admit it to no one, not under intense duress, but he spends the better part of the afternoon trying on most of his wardrobe, ironing and reironing as each shirt became, inevitably, wrinkled. He’s an art teacher slash artist, in this life (and funny how his hasty cover looks so much like the life he’s moving towards), and no one cares what artists wear.

This is not the kind of thing that matters, he tells himself. He doesn’t wonder what ‘look nice’ means, and he certainly doesn’t stare at himself in the mirror, wondering what Bucky might think.

Definitely not.

+

The elevator dings its arrival. Steve clutches the tupperware to his breast, a lone bag of corn chips perched on top. As the doors slide open, Bucky’s face goes from welcoming to confused to resigned in a series of microexpressions.

“What did you bring,” he asks in a flat tone. Yes, resignation is there.

“Cheese dip?” Steve wonders if this is wrong, somehow. “I don’t know, it’s a party. I thought I should bring something.”

Bucky leads them to his office, shuts the door.

“It’s a nice thought, but they cater these things, you know.” Bucky takes the container from his hands and pops it open, staring obliquely into the orange mess studded with red bits. “What the hell is this?”

“I saw it on a commercial, once. Velveeta and salsa,” Steve says. They’re both staring down at it now. It wiggles in the container when Bucky shakes it, like an alien creature. “It tastes better than it looks.”

“That’s a low bar to cross.” Bucky probes at it with one finger. A film has formed on top, and it bounces back after his finger relents.

“You can trash it,” Steve says, but Bucky’s fighting back a smile. “If it’s going to be a problem—”

“We’re putting it out, for sure.” He laughs to himself. “Let me go get a dish.”

+

Bucky drops a kiss on the part of his hair, like it’s nothing at all. Their bodies slide together on an attractive leather couch. Steve’s become one of several very beautiful trophy partners in this very polished office. He feels claimed, the way Bucky’s hand slips over his shoulders, down his back. They all of them, the office mates, are jockeying for position continually; with their dates, their girlfriends and boyfriends and wives and husbands, it’s nothing new or different. Just a different arena. For all that Alman wants to make it a family, it’s a nest of vipers.

It shouldn’t distract him, Bucky being handsy, sliding a palm up his arm, scratching the back of his neck. A gesture of ownership, really, as Bucky tells his coworkers about Steve’s art.

“Just had a piece bought by Pepper Potts, actually,” Bucky says, and Steve refrains from doing a cartoonish double take.

It’s true, though. There’s no reason Bucky should know about that.

“How’d you know?” is all he can say.

Bucky, interrupted from boasting, takes a moment to pull an answer together. “Oh, Tony told me. I saw it.”

It’s not an answer to his real question—that Bucky knows Steve paints, in reality, in real life, the life where Bucky is just a strange, flirtatious mystery who’s never had cause to touch Steve in his life, except the handful of times he pulled Steve from a fight.

He wants to press him. This isn’t the time, isn’t the place. But he opens his mouth, forgetting the assignment, feeling somehow exposed, a strange raw intimacy that he can’t tell if he likes or not.

“This is my Steve,” Bucky says to a pair of coworkers. The possessive throws Steve for a loop, and he catches himself looking too intently before turning to the strangers eager to meet him. “And he brought snacks!”

Truth be told, he panicked, just a little. Steve hadn’t been a spy for years, and handling details prepped you exactly as much as you needed to service your agent. It was a party. Never show up to a party empty-handed, his mother had said.

He should have picked up wine.

“Steve,” a woman coos at him. She’s got piercing green eyes and red, red lips, perched high on five inch heels. “Delighted, Catarina.” The hand she extends feels soft to the touch, except where her polished curved nails trace lines across his palm. Her smile speaks of prey. He nods, valiantly, and pushes closer to Bucky.

“Oh, Bucky’s boy in the closet. So we’re seeing you again,” the man says, dismissive. He indicates toward the break room. “I wondered why he was hiding you. Thought we’d scare you off, like David.”

Catarina shrugs. “Well, Maxie, you’re never very nice to my starter husband.”

“Maxwell,” Maxwell corrects. “You call him that to his face?”

“Only everyday,” Catarina says. “It’s good to keep them on their toes.”

Her smile is ice, her accent syrup-thick and smooth over her hidden teeth. Bucky’d described her as a shark, and Steve saw it, the Chesire grin and eyes that disappeared in private, malicious amusement. Plus, a remarkable ability to pull off harem pants. It is Casual Friday, he supposes.

Her eyes dismiss Maxwell, as if he weren’t there at all, and Steve watches him bristle. Worse than criminals, these assholes and their politics. Maxwell oozes a put-on upper class boredom, picks at an imaginary thread on his cuff as he pretends to be above the conversation. A careful retreat. Bucky tipped him off to these two, and a few others. People to observe.

“Steve,” she purrs again, with contemptuous grace. “What have you brought to offer us?”

He nods, bright and smiling. He can be a golden retriever of a boyfriend, blond and shining and dumb.

“Cheese dip,” he says, eyes wide and innocent.

“Lovely,” she says.

“Great,” Maxwell deadpans. He takes a chip and dip, and swallows with a pained frown. “Velveeta, Jesus Christ,” he says under his breath, and Steve chokes back a laugh. That’s why Bucky put it out.

Steve looks to Bucky, wants to share the joke. Instead, Bucky’s ignoring the two and watching him.

Bucky’s hand won’t leave his back, right at the base of his spine. He has this private smile hidden on his face, with soft eyes tracing over Steve. His thumbs rolls relentless circles on Steve’s back, and Steve’s blood hums in response, a flush creeping up the back of his neck. He fight the urge to squirm. To writhe.

It’s a good performance, ignoring the asshole colleagues to cozy up to the boyfriend.

Steve’s skin prickles anyway.

Bucky stands, pulls him up off the couch with an insistent hand.

“Excuse us a minute,” he says, and Steve follows. Behind them, Catarina raises an eyebrow, sharp eyes catching everything. Easy enough for them to escape this way, with Bucky’s hand dipping low on the small of his back.

“So, how’d you know about the painting?” They’re walking down the hallway, past Bucky’s door.

“Catarina or Max,” Bucky says. “It’s one of them.”

Alright, they weren’t talking about that, then.

“Either, I can see,” Steve says. “They’re ruthless, intelligent. You ruled out Adrien himself then? All the other employees?”

“It’s not a technical issue. They had access to client files. The kind of extortion that happened, it’s not from the software. They’re careful, but it was one of them. No one else had access to the exact same client personnel files.”

Their voices are hushed, their bodies turned toward each other. Bucky’s pinning him in, a hand by his head, the other by his side. Steve knows how to look receptive, pulls him close by the belt, murmurs soft in Bucky’s ear. His breath moves the dark hair curling behind Bucky’s ear. Anyone who walks by will see an intimate moment and look away, embarrassed—it really is remarkable how well this ploy works.

His heart beats harder, faster, and really, it shouldn’t work on him.

“Simple extortion, then, and the security uncompromised, you think.”

“Hard to be sure, but my guess is the extortion is a byproduct of Adrien’s background files, not the software itself,” he says. He leans in close, close. His mouth ghosts along Steve’s jaw. “His paranoia makes it possible, not the security.”

Steve should probably go on more dates, because the way Bucky’s breath feels on his skin becomes--distracting. He can’t help the way his fingers tighten in response, and how Bucky moves into him, into his space, a little more with each passing second.

“Max or Catarina, then,” he breathes out, and hates the way his voice has gone husky.

Bucky hums his agreement, low in Steve’s ear. They’re so close Steve feels it, rather than hears it.

A ghost of kiss passes by on the corner of his jaw. Steve swallows, blinks rapidly to clear his head. It’s been too long since he’s had an assignment like this—too long since he’s had contact like this—and he needs to extract himself. Retreat.

“Let’s bug their offices,” he suggests.

Bucky pulls back, a wicked grin spreading on his face. “I thought you’d never ask.”

+

Before they can pick the lock for Max’s office, the alarm sounds, high and piercing. It would worry them, except they haven’t done anything, have barely moved from where their limbs are mixed in the long, stretching shadows of the hallways after dark.

“Off we go, boys,” Alman calls their way as he exits his office. “Someone’s broken a window.”

“Is that all?” Steve asks, putting his innocent face to good use.

“That security system’s finicky, you better know. Any broken glass sets it off, and locks down the whole floor.”

“And now we know,” Bucky says. Steve gives a tight nod and swallows, pulling himself back in his body, willing his heart to slow down.

“Tomorrow we’ll work it out,” Steve says.

“I’ll get you here somehow.”

+

That night, Steve sits on the edge of his bed, watches his pale hands spread out against the dark navy of the comforter. A wall separates them, he and Bucky, a wall both three feet wide and seemingly infinite. After the party, he retreated in his room, feigning sleep, space. It isn’t space he wants, or sleep, but he thinks it best.

On the other side of the wall, Bucky lies in bed, curled around a space filled with nothing, no one, and watches the hands that got to touch, got to feel. Strange, to feel so close to someone. He wonders if Steve knows.

This will not last forever.

+

Bring takeout, Bucky’s text reads the following day. The address follows. Need a pickmeup.

Steve feels less like a handler, sometimes, and more like an errand boy.

“Who ordered Mongolian beef,” Bucky says, disdain evident in his voice as they unpack the cartons.

“What’s wrong with that?” Steve says.

Bucky just raises an eyebrow.

“No, I’m serious,” he says.

Bucky huffs a sigh. “I don’t know what I expected, Velveeta.”

This is a mystery to Steve, but one he feels content not to examine.

+

After lunch, Steve sits in an overpriced, overstuffed loveseat in Bucky’s office and watches as Bucky works.

Steve’s trying to figure him out. He likes Bucky, despite knowing so little about him. Steve finds him charming, the quick smile, the crinkling eyes. Maybe in a different life, he’d take Bucky up on it, the little suggestions, an invitation to dinner and where that would lead. It’s only--Steve doesn’t do casual, can’t. And he doubts that’s more than what’s offered here.

It makes him wonder how the hell he’ll date after this, when everyone he’s dated, every person who catches his attention, has been a part of this world. As much as he’s started to dream of the settled domestic thing, half his life’s been spent working for an underground espionage agency, and that’s the kind of thing you don’t want to explain to your partner as you go to pick eggplants at the Farmer’s Market.

Steve doesn’t know what he’d do with an eggplant if he had one. But one day, maybe.

“You know how to cook eggplant?” He asks, apropos of something, though he couldn’t say what.

“How do you mean?” Bucky’s fingers tip tap away over the keyboard, and his eyes jump back and forth across the screen in discrete moments.

“Can you cook an eggplant?”

His fingers still. “I mean, yes.” His eyes narrow. His head falls to one side. His brow furrows. A study in confusion. “Any way in particular?”

“The most…basic? As in, what could I not screw up?”

“Oh. You’re a terrible cook.” Bucky frowns in surprise. “I should have realized. You seem so capable, though.”

“Not terrible—just a beginner.” Defensive isn’t a good look on him. Still, Bucky just smiles to himself in response and turns back to his screen, fingers firing a rapid noise on the keyboard.

“Never mind. I’ll teach you some time. How will you make it on the outside otherwise?”

On the outside. So Bucky knows. Bucky knows a lot about him, somehow, about things Steve hasn’t volunteered to anyone. He thinks, Natasha, probably. Still—it’s not like she would offer up that intel to someone without prompting.

Adrien peeks his head in. “Bucky, I need you to—oh, Steve! I didn’t realize you were here. Nice of you to stop by on your Saturday, entertain our Bucky. So kind to let us steal him away from you, every weekend.” He beams down at Steve. A kindly older man, whose domestic bliss wants everyone else to share the same happiness. Strangely sweet, Steve thinks, for someone so paranoid.

“We’re discussing how to cook eggplant,” Bucky says. “Steve’s a terrible cook.”

“No I’m not,” Steve huffs.

“It’s alright, I’m good at it,” Bucky says, still typing away. “Just let me do the cooking. Always and forever.”

He favors Steve with a flippant grin before turning his attention to Adrien.

“What can I do for you?”

+

First up is Catarina: a little black button under her desk, easy to miss. They go lo-fi with this mission. No reason to tip off a waiting IT guy with a keystroke copier when a simple bug will suffice.

They exit her office, Steve as point man faking a call and pacing in the hallway. Catarina’s trotting back to her office, visible through the glass windows of the conference room. The end of their hallway has little to offer in the way of hiding places, and predictably, they duck into a storage room. Nothing but files, box after box of files, labeled with an indecipherable numbering system.

“Hmm.” Bucky wrinkles his nose, looks at the closed door.

“We should wait it out, a few minutes.”

Bucky nods. “One down.”

They lean together against a file shelf. Bucky pulls a box out, rifles absentmindedly through the labels.

“You sure about Adrien? That this isn’t him, playing a double game?” It’s been on Steve’s mind, Bucky’s certainty about him.

“No, doesn’t make sense.” Bucky’s dismissive. “You trust me, here? With this job?”

“Of course. Why wouldn’t I?”

“That’s a bad attitude to have in this business.”

“You know what I mean—we’ve worked together. You’ve never given me a reason not to.”

“Defector, though—you can never trust a defector,” Bucky says, his fingertips easing between folder after folder. They’re not his words. Steve can hear it in the cadence of his voice.

“Bucky,” Steve starts, but there’s footsteps outside the door, and the doorknob starts to jiggle.

Bucky turns on his heels and unzips Steve’s pants, one-handed. It happens quick. By the time the door’s open, with Maxwell looking down on Bucky’s head, the wet heat of Bucky’s breath on Steve’s boxers is enough to send blood rushing down, down.

“You mind, Max,” Bucky drawls. “We’re having a moment here. Blowing off steam.” He winks.

“Maxwell,” he corrects with a sigh. “You have to do that here?”

Bucky leans his cheek into Steve’s rapidly hardening dick, and Steve thinks of anything, anything, everything that’s not the ghost of Bucky’s breath and the filthy, vivid image that came with it.

“You rather we do this on your desk?” Bucky asks.

“Oh, Christ,” Steve says, and he tries to divide 43729 by 14. About three thousand, he guesses. His dick’s still hard.

“Very professional,” Maxwell says. He pauses symbolically, a sardonic eyebrow raised. “I’ll leave you to it then.”

Bucky doesn’t answer; instead he wets his lips, tongue pushing through his full lips. Steve chokes down a moan and slams the door shut.

“Are you kidding me right now,” he tries for angry, but he gets breathy instead. He swallows, hard, trying to collect himself.

Bucky stays on his knees, and his eyes are wide and dark where they look up at him. One glance is enough to see what he’s done to Steve, and his parted lips turn up with a hint of sly grin.

He points a thumb toward the door. ‘Still there,’ he mouths. He gestures a circle with his hand as if to say, get on with it. ‘Moan already.’

Steve groans, but it has the same effect. They hear footsteps signify a departure.

“It’s a good cover, Steve,” Bucky says. “Besides, you know them—have to lean into it, or they never let you live it down.”

“I’m sure,” Steve says, but he believes him. Besides—he shouldn’t be bothered. Not by the situation, not by his reaction. None of it. It’s just been too long since he’s been on assignment like this.

Or too long since he’s been on a date.

One of the two.

The silence stretches thin between them. Outside the closed, locked door, there’s a hum of activity, the thumps of some young professional running up the hall yelling about a pissy client, the thrum of a printer, phone call after phone call. But they say nothing. They only look, and look, and Steve can see the moment Bucky has a terrible idea.

Bucky’s hands land on either side of Steve’s hips, pinning him without touch.

“What do you want, Steve,” he says, tongue running along the inside of his lower lip, just a hint of pink flesh promising warm, wet heat.

Steve swallows, finds the ceiling to stare at. Without the eye contact, without anything to distract him, the hot breath ghosting over his boxers curls through to his skin. It’s unbearable.

“This is a bad idea,” he says, and as much as his dick disagrees, it really is.

When he looks down, Bucky stretches back, pops his spine.

They’re both waiting for him to say something, say anything.

“Such a bad idea,” he repeats, but he can’t look away from the promise of Bucky’s open mouth.

“You trying to convince me or you, here?”

Steve shrugs. “I don’t even know.”

It breaks the tension a little, and Steve breathes out, long and slow, his shoulders falling down. They both want it—that much is obvious, between Steve’s not-so-subtle erection and Bucky’s patient offering. But it won’t happen, not today. The moment’s stretched on too far, too long, and their window for consummation, with the excuse of the heat of the moment, has shut. They have to go home to the same apartment together, have to wake up and see each other over coffee, have to work together. Maybe it would release the tension, but it’s not a chance Steve wants to take. Nor is it what he wants, really.

Seeing Steve relax, retreat, Bucky shudders to a stand.

“Well, now that we know where we stand,” he says. There’s resignation there, and something else. If Steve didn’t know better, he’d think it were nerves.

“It really is a bad idea, Buck,” Steve says, his voice soft. “Not on the job.”

“Got it.” Bucky nods.

And that’s that.

+

Steve goes out for beer and Chinese. A peace offering of sorts, except there was no argument. A roommate gesture, maybe. A gift of good faith. He can’t be sure what it is, but it’s something at least. Bucky gets the door for him. His easy smile, relaxed shoulders, are meant to soothe. He’s good at that.

“Oh, it’s the good place,” he says in lieu of a greeting. “I guess the beer’ll do.”

Steve shrugs. He’s never been picky, at least not with food. He’d gone to the same place as before and hadn’t thought more about it.

Over basil short ribs and cold soft tendon, they make the kind of conversation only agents make. Which is to say, half-boasting, half-humble, and altogether negligent of the kind of horrific danger they face on the regular. It’s a good distraction from whatever that was.

“I heard you took out a dozen armed men with just a trash can lid.”

“I heard you shot a guy from half a mile away,” Steve says over a beer.

Bucky pulls a face.

“Not as impressive, though.”

“I don’t know. I sure as hell couldn’t do it.”

“Eh, nothing I can do that a machine can’t do better,” Bucky says, dismissive, but Steve doesn’t let it go.

“Machine can’t break through its programming. You’re too hard on yourself.”

“Yeah? Maybe you’re just not hard enough,” and the leer gives it away. Very Bucky, Steve thinks, to flirt as misdirection. That’s all it is.

“That’s not even a good line.”

“Whatever, you laughed.”

It’s normal, their version of normal, that they’re carving out in their strange, sparse apartment. A normal that refuses to mention the earlier offer and rejection.

Although, when Steve goes to sleep that evening, it was another soft no he’d offered. Not even a no, really. Because he hadn’t wanted to say it.

+

_Working late_ , Bucky’s text reads the next week. _What are you eating for dinner_

Steve plumbs the depths of their fridge, and eats a handful of blue cheese-stuffed olives. All it does is make him hungrier.

_Basically nothing_

_Get groceries? I’ll cook, whatever you want._ The text arrives immediately, like he was waiting for that answer. Steve chooses not to read into it and buys pork chops.

Bucky fries them to perfection, and they go over the day’s new information.

The case proceeds. Bucky goes to work. Steve monitors the bugs. At night they talk, sometimes about the job.

+

“Art school, huh,” Bucky says. Yet another thing Bucky knows that he shouldn’t. He should worry that Steve will read into it, but maybe he wants that. Still, he’s casual about it, the invasion of privacy. Steve takes it in stride, like everything.  

“Yup.”

“Why’d you join up?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why’d you enlist, if that’s what you wanted to do?”

Steve sighs. “I don’t know. I was young, Ma just died.” He shrugs. “I wanted to make difference.”

It feels familiar, too familiar. “And you stayed because, what, you were good at it.”

The look Steve gives him pulls at a string deep beneath his ribs. “You got it.”

Bucky nods. The skyline outside his window glitters lovely, a replacement night sky for a city of light pollution. The glass reflects the ghosts of their faces, their bodies next to each other on the couch. Always some distance between them, but still, together.

“It’s good you’re getting out.” He means it.

“You think so?”

Bucky hums a yes.

Steve’s hand lands on his shoulder with a little shake. “You don’t have to do this forever, you know. You don’t owe them anything.”

Bucky snorts. “Course I do. You saw me.”

“If you ever did, it’s already paid. You don’t owe them your whole life.”

His hand slides up Bucky’s neck, encourages Bucky to look at him.

“You don’t have to prove anything, not to anyone.”

“Yeah? How do you know that?”

“Took me years of my life to learn that one.”

Steve’s eyes are impossibly kind, his smile terribly gentle. They could lean in, easy, kiss before the twinkling black outside, melding silhouettes into one.

Instead, Bucky drinks his beer, an easy pull in and down his throat. The swallow settles his nervous skin. He doesn’t want another no. Not here, in this moment, where he feels horribly exposed. No, he wants acceptance, not rejection, and so he lets the moment slide away, another moment of ‘what would have happened.’ What never happened

“What would I even do?” He says to the glass window.

“Whatever you want.”

+

“I don’t know, Nat,” Steve says, unwilling to engage in her interrogation. “It’s fine.”

“Give me something, Rogers. How’s he doing, your boyfriend Bucky?” She smacks her gum just to annoy him. It echoes in the phone. “How’s domestic bliss.”

“Why do you tell Bucky all my secrets?”

She chuckles, soft over the phone. “Because he asks.”

Instead of getting under his skin, all it does it remind him of a memory he’s trying to wipe clean: Bucky on his knees, his mouth only separated from Steve’s cock by old, too-thin cotton. Or worse, Bucky with bedhead in the morning; Bucky opening a beer with his metal hand, giving it to Steve; Bucky, pouring over the case file, furrowed brow over intent eyes. He wishes it were just attraction. He makes his excuses, cuts the call short, but ‘domestic bliss’ is a phrase that echoes in his head for days. If it’s petulant of him to resent her for that, at least he’d never voice it aloud.

+

“You keep frowning like that, it’ll get stuck that way.”

Bucky frowned deeper at the notes in his lap. “I’m not frowning.”

“Oh, alright,” Steve says, lips tight to hide a smile.

Ridiculous affections flares inside him—Steve’s spilt his coffee again. For a grown ass man, an accomplished agent, it’s remarkable how challenging he finds physical tasks like drinking liquid, or navigating his bizarrely broad shoulders through a doorway. It must be an ‘off’ thing—whenever he’s on, Steve has remarkable grace. But once relaxed, he’s as absentminded and strangely clumsy as a juvenile elephant.

Something strange in his gut, an uncomfortable twist, that he chooses to ignore. A knot, tightening before coming undone. Or maybe like the snap of a puzzle piece, one step closer to whole.

+

Living with Bucky feels—easy. Too easy. The rhythms of their lives come together, complement one another. It’s how he knows that Bucky drinks four cups of coffee in an hour, and only shaves every third day.

“It grows in soft and patchy,” he shrugs. “Never grown it out.”

“You have a baby face. I shave each morning. Every time I’m off, I get a beard,” Steve says. It’s flippant, but Bucky considers his face with a long look, tracing the contours of Steve’s jaw and cheeks and mouth with his eyes.

“Lumberjack Steve,” he says, no inflection.

Steve laughs. “Please. You can’t drag me out of the city.”

The coffee in their cups dwindles to nothing, but they linger over the breakfast counter and watch as the time ticks closer to when they both leave the apartment. Steve does the paper’s crossword—a young habit, one he’s trying on as he thinks about what his life after work will look like. Routines, habits, hobbies: he’s cultivating them all.

Bucky reads articles on his tablet, one flesh finger stroking up and and up and up while the mug handle hangs from a metal finger. It’s easy, these mornings. Bucky’s tie hangs around his neck, unknotted; his suit jacket lies folded across a chair back, waiting for his departure.

A quarter till eight hits, and they’re both going, every morning. Steve to his ‘studio,’ a makeshift office to listen to recordings, analyze what he can of Bucky’s information, and coordinate with analysts for everything that remains inaccessible. Bucky to his office, to his persona as the charming wunderkind of financial security, with the trophy boyfriend.

It’s easy, too easy, and when Steve fixes Bucky’s collar, straightens his tie, and their eyes catch on each other, soft smiles barely registering, he feels a little pull deep below his ribs that only registers in his conscious mind once they part ways on the street.

Oh.

+

“I need you to come to the Hamptons with me,” Bucky says in lieu of a hello. It’s been weeks now, with nothing. They’re sitting on their asses, essentially, waiting for a move.

In response, Steve raises an eyebrow.

“They like you. Besides, it’s easier to sneak around when you’re there.”

“This job is a joke,” Steve says over his beer. Bucky’s already chopping things, onions and garlic and peppers. He refuses Steve’s help with the wave of a hand.

“I don’t mind it too much. Besides—it’s your last one. Wouldn’t you rather go out easy?”

Truth be told, he’d rather go out with a bang, but that’s not for anyone to know. Steve’s flair for the dramatic needn’t reveal itself to any and everyone.

“You’re probably right,” Steve says. “What should I pack?”

+

Bucky’s staring intently at the spread.

“Goat cheese and sundried tomato, what is this, 1997?” He mumbles to himself.

“What?” Steve looks confused.

“Nothing,” Bucky says, and politely bites a cracker.

They’re sitting on an immaculate white porch on immaculate white furniture sipping pale, cloudy, sweet drinks, tasting faintly of gin and citrus. Steve’s wearing shorts. Bucky looks elsewhere, trying not to notice the expanse of pale, muscled thigh that’s been bared to the world. His linen pants would do little to hide any uncomfortable physical reactions.

He should have thought this through. The pants, sure, but also Steve. As a handler, he would have been fine. It would have been fun, maybe, teasing him, working with him, trying to get a rise. As a partner, though, it’s been half-bliss, half-agony, and as with his soft white linen pants, he feels horribly exposed whenever Steve’s around, whenever they leave their soft cocoon of an apartment.

Worse, now, this weekend--he isn’t even sure why he agreed, when Adrien invited them. Sure, it helps their cover, but Bucky’s work did that for them. It must be some form of masochism, he imagines Dr. Burke saying, that Bucky forces them closer and closer, wanting and wanting, while knowing that Steve won’t say yes.

He should know better.

“When are Max and Catarina supposed to get in, do you know?” Bucky makes conversation with Mrs. Alman, wife of forty years, a slight nervous woman with a penchant for small nervous dogs (the current animal, a pugapoo named Pickles, had some strange breathing disorder that results a phenomenon known as ‘reverse sneezing’). Bucky would claim that observation, that humans and their dogs resembled each other to an uncanny degree, except he remembered first seeing it in 101 Dalmations. A good spy never let on that his primary observations about the human character came from Disney films.

“Oh, sweet Catarina’s cried off, sadly,” Midge says. “Something to do with a family emergency, I’m afraid.”

“That’s too bad. I’d like to catch her with her hair down sometime,” Steve says. “I’ve only ever seen her at work.”

“Well, I hope soon! Such energy, that girl. Always on the go.” She smiles with crinkled eyes, delighted at their company.

“Yes, energy,” Bucky says, thinking of the client she’d reduced to tears with scathing remarks. “She’s full of something, alright.”

“Unlike you,” Steve jokes. “The very pinnacle of innocence. Pure as the driven snow.” His grin belies the statement.

“You think I’m depraved, Stevie? Now where would you get that idea.” He tries on the nickname, likes the feel of it in his mouth.

“No, never,” Steve says, irrepressible grin fading into what Bucky refers to as his Scout’s Honor face. “I just heard things.”

“Things?”

“You and Clint, things,” Steve says. His eyes widen, but there’s a smirk peeking out between his full lips.

“We can’t be thinking of the same Clint.” This is a weird rumor. He blames Nat.

“What, who’s Clint?” Mrs Alman asks. She’s been watching them with all the pleasure of a woman who would refer to soap operas as ‘her stories.’

“The human version of toast that lands butter side down, every time,” Bucky says. He startles a laugh out of Steve, whose full body cackle surprises Midge and Bucky both.

+

The high point of the afternoon, depending on who you ask, is when Pickles falls off the dock, into two feet of water. Bucky imagines that were it deeper, he’d have gotten to see a full on lifeguard dive out of Steve. Instead, Steve politely toes off his shoes and hops down, sadly leaving all apparel dry as a bone.

Midge flutters about, nervous hands flapping like escaping birds. “Oh, Steve, what a dear. It’s so easy for them to drown, you know. Short nasal passages.”

Bucky hides a laugh as Steve nods deep, earnest as he can be.

“What a catch you have,” she addresses this to Bucky. “I can’t tell you how happy it makes me, to see such lovely young people in love.”

Behind her, Steve clutches his breast in faux-heartbreak, but Bucky’s poker face can withstand much more than that.

He claps Steve hard on the back. “What a prize, right?”

Afterward, the sun setting orange and hazy, Bucky can’t help but rib him a bit.

“You can’t stop playing the hero, can you?”

“What was I supposed to do, let the thing drown?”

“It’s basically a rat,” Bucky says.

“Heartless,” Steve laughs in his face. It’s easy, too easy, to laugh along with him and pretend that she’s right.

+

There must be a company that does nothing but manufacture shitty beach artwork in pale blues and soft beige and pops of pale peach. Put your toes in the sand! a sign reads above the full bed. A faux impressionistic sailboat sits stagnant before a saccharine sunset. Steve wants to punch it, the soothing aggression of the bad art curdling his mood. His nose wrinkles in distaste.

“What do you think of these paintings?”

Bucky shrugs, dismissive. He opens his mouth to speak a few times without saying anything; he flops onto the bed and stares into the molded ceiling. Something’s up. Steve waits, lets him gather his thoughts.

“I have to warn you—I have nightmares, sometimes.” His voice is flat.

Bucky doesn’t do this, doesn’t reveal information lightly.

“Oh, well, I’m a cuddler,” Steve says, intentionally nonchalant. A minefield if he ever saw one, and he tries to defuse the whole thing. “In interest of full disclosure.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I. It’s involuntary. Don’t take it too personal if I spoon you against your will.”

“Steve.” Bucky sits upright and stares past him, his mouth thin-lipped with strain. “When it happens, I don’t know, I can get disoriented. Especially in a strange place. I just—in case anything happens.”  

Steve looks at him hard, and nods. “Got it, yeah.”

Bucky nods in response, or in imitation, and flops back on the off-white comforter that pillows him in downy fluff. Steve unpacks, and they’re quiet, and the sounds of the house bustling along slip under the door.

It’s difficult (it’s unfair, his petulant inner child exclaims, deep in the recesses of his mind), being so near Bucky, unable to touch, to hold. It’s gotten harder lately. The press of his realization, the little click of world-shifting epiphany that he’s continued to deny, pushes in on him, and he bears it well. Has always borne it well. Part of his character. But moments like this, where Bucky looks so small, in need of something that Steve would happily give—and being unable to reach out and touch and soothe and comfort in any material way—Christ, they’re hard.

Still, it’s over soon. Will be over soon.

He can’t tell if that’s a relief or something much worse, much more damning.

+

As agents on assignment, it’s not unusual to share a bed. It’s normal. You get used to it. You hold to your own space, let it go when an ankle touches your own. Nothing about it should be cause for alarm. For tension. For—anything else.

It’s not like Bucky’s that worried about nightmares. They happen. He’s not violent, during, only terrified. Nat’s talked him down afterward, a couple times now. And Steve—well, he’s kind. Bucky’s not worried about Steve.

Bucky’s a little concerned about waking up scared and clutching Steve’s body like he never wants to let go. He’s thought about it, in the dark of his room, only a thin wall between them--slipping between Steve’s sheets, Steve’s hands on his back, soothing, calming, lovely, close. This is something he doesn’t admit to himself, in the light of day, except that now it’s too close to real to ignore.

As it turns out, the wrong person was concerned about this. Or rather, Bucky heeded his own warning too much, and Steve’s not at all.

Because come morning, Steve’s wrapped around him like a particularly friendly squid, making tiny noises into Bucky’s neck that weren’t wholly dissimilar from Pickles’ resting pant. In addition to one other, unignorable fact, it’s just not what he expected.

He wants to sink into it, the strange comfort of Steve’s entangled limbs, the hot breath that stirs the hairs on the back his neck. The feel of Steve, hard against his ass. Still, he feel like he should say something. That something should be said.

“Steve,” he says, and his early morning voice, hoarse with disuse, comes out husky, deep.

“Mmm,” Steve hums into his neck, and Bucky feels it all the way down his spine. The spoon of Steve’s body gets closer, somehow, as Steve snuggles deeper in.

“Steve,” he repeats. “Wake up.”

“What,” Steve says, lifting his head. The sense of his limbs, curled around and about Bucky, seems to arrive slowly, a trickle of information that follows Steve’s eyes as he looks down. “Oh.”

He pulls back and groans.

“Good morning,” Bucky says. His words come out soft and tender, though he hadn’t meant them to.

Steve flops on his back and groans some more, covering his face with his hands. “Fuck, I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s—” Bucky begins, but the phone interrupts him. Fine, maybe he would have said. Nothing, maybe. What I want, will always go unspoken, though it runs through his head as Steve rolls for his phone.

“Rogers,” he says. He listens, responds with clipped answers when necessary, and hangs up. He scrubs his face with one hand, again.

“It’s Maxwell,” he says. “I had someone listen in for us last night. He made a call from his office.”

“And?” Bucky prompts.

Steve blinks, clearing sleep from his eyes, and it tugs at Bucky’s chest. Maybe it would be easy to ignore this, to pull Steve back in bed. Maybe Steve would say yes, for a change. Maybe he would want it, too.

Bucky hopes so, but watching Steve shake off sleep, shake off the pretense of their arrangement, and he thinks not.

“He made arrangements for another job,” Steve says, pulling on his pants.

His back is turned to Bucky, so his voice, steady and calm, and Bucky wonders if he’ll say anything else.

“Bucky, I--” and the hesitation in Steve’s voice overwhelms him, hits like a punch to the gut.

“No, it’s fine,” he cuts him off, unwilling to hear another no. “It happens.”

+

“It’s a link,” Hill says, voice fuzzy over the speakerphone in their apartment once they get back. The ride back was quiet, but with purpose—their job finally has purpose, has forward momentum, and they know to follow this where it leads, not dwell on a morning’s awkwardness.

“We’ve found corroborating evidence from his bank accounts. We’ve got a warrant for a line on his phones. Now we just wait.”

+

Maxwell doesn’t make them wait long—less than a day. It’s almost over, then. Transfer of files to happen that evening, after work. Midnight, because he was, is, a dramatic asshole.

“After tonight, it’ll be done,” Bucky says over coffee. He slurps his coffee the way that makes Steve smile, the way Steve won’t see anymore. Not on the daily, at least.

The thought wakes him up, as if from a lovely dream. He shakes himself.

“Feels like it’s taken forever,” he says, to no one in particular.

“Yeah,” Bucky agrees.

The morning passes in silence, companionable, if a little melancholy. Steve packs his things and leaves the duffel by the front door, next to the foyer table. An easy exit would be best for everyone, he thinks.

+

Max’s as good as caught, his incriminating phone call right on time. The motive doesn’t matter—though it’s all money, to these assholes, money and boredom. Steve and Bucky listen in, from Bucky’s office; Hill texts within the minute, keep him there.

They look at each other.

“Set off security?” Steve says.

Bucky sighs. “It’s the easy thing to do. Besides, I don’t want to talk to this dick any more.”

Steve, in lieu of an answer, sends a brass paperweight through the window. In response, the alarm sounds; the doors lock with a click in between shrill tones. Falling back on the couch, Steve gives him a half-miserable look.

“What, did you want to fight someone?” Bucky raises an eyebrow. He turns in circles in his chair, swivelling round and round, antsy.

“I don’t know, maybe.” He’s not totally serious, but is a little. His blood courses with unspent adrenaline. “Boring way to get out, don’t you think?”

“I can think of ways to liven up the evening,” Bucky says, flippant, with a grin and a wink.

This is not unusual. It’s barely inappropriate. But to Steve, who’s restless in the night and itching to get out, get away, somehow it’s the wrong thing to say, the wrong moment to say it. It’s too little and too much, all at once; his gut churns, resentful almost, that Bucky can tread so lightly with this.

“I’m not having sex with you,” his voice final. Decisive. He’d given Bucky this run of soft no’s, half believing that it meant nothing that he played along, but he knew better. He knows better.

“What, never?” Bucky turns again in his chair, swivelling. He’s not serious, but Steve can’t play, not with this.

The memory of skin on skin, blood pulsing hard underneath soft lips, pushes up from the bottom of his mind. He’s getting off track. It’s important to be clear. “Bucky, I’m getting out, after this. And I think we want different things. So, you know, it’s not that I don’t want to, but.”

Steve tries for a smile, but it’s a grimace he feels on his face. Maybe it’s ridiculous, taking an off-hand comment and making it serious, but there they are. He won’t dance around it anymore.

Bucky blinks at him. He supposes the mask, the absence of expression, is a reflex, but at times like these, Steve wants more than anything to see what he feels.

“No, of course,” Bucky says. Steve waits, expecting more, but nothing came. And he knows he’s a goner, because he wants some pushback. He wants a demand to explain himself.

He wants Bucky to force a confession from his lips, and he wants, more than anything, to see a reaction, to watch the play of surprise and confusion and acceptance and desire, to hear Bucky correct him, ’we want the same thing, Steve.’

Instead, there’s silence, and Bucky, still as marble, looking anywhere, everywhere but at him.

His heart sinks, his stomach turns, but he smiles tightly, though there’s no one to see. They nod once at each  another, transmissions complete, and their eyes turn the same direction, both studying the wall across them, a grey-blue designed to calm, to soothe. The careful inches between them neither widen nor close, the distance between them preserved.

They wait.

+

SHIELD arrives late, past two. They haven’t spoken for an hour, but it’s done: Maxwell van der Meer, in custody, a warrant for his arrest on at least one count of extortion, more to follow. Bucky and Steve depart in separate cars, without words. It’s on Hill to explain the deceit to Alman, and on Alman to communicate it to his employees. All for the best really—a job well done, for everyone. Easy, clean, the only damage a single, broken window.

Steve, looking back on his career, of bullets and paperwork and death and glory, feels almost lost that it’s over. Anticlimactic, really, that the end was just breaking glass and waiting around.

“What do you need from me?” He asks Hill.

“Just paperwork now. Go the fuck to sleep. Give me a week and you’re done.”

Soon, so soon, and it’s not as if it isn’t what he wants, what he wanted. He just feels like there should be more loose ends. A reason to go back to the apartment and sleep and wake up for another cup of coffee and a morning crossword.

Instead, he grabs his duffel and misses Bucky by fifteen minutes.

+

“And Steve?”

“Excuse me?”

“How’s Steve?”

He shakes his head, surprised at the question, though he shouldn’t be. “I don’t know. We haven’t spoken in—oh, weeks now. Since I left.”

“I’m surprised, Bucky,” Adrien says.

“Why’s that?”

“I don’t know, I just assumed—more than anything else, I thought that was real. I’m not in the business of reading people, but he certainly seemed infatuated with you.”

Bucky had gone into—not apologize, exactly, but talk. Mr. Alman had been strangely attentive and kind to him, and he felt, somehow without realizing why, that he owed him something in return. Some kind of explanation.

Instead, he’d gotten a round of careful, considerate questions, too kind really.

“So what’s next for you in your agency?” Adrien asks.

“I’m leaving the agency,” Bucky says, and as soon as he says it, he knows it’s true, though it hadn’t been, all of ten minutes before. “It’s just—time.”

He’s stunned, hearing himself speak, but that’s the manner of these things for him. Once made, the decision’s done, the hardest part accomplished. Now it’s just fallout.

After lunch, Adrien shakes his hand with a firm, dry grip, steadfast. “Bucky, if you ever need anything—a job, a recommendation, you come to me first, alright? You’ve done me a favor, here, and with as little damage as possible. I appreciate it, truly.”

Overwhelmed, Bucky smiles, nods, and makes a quick exit.

It would be strange, working there, in his new, real life. Though he did enjoy listening to Catarina pick the bones of smaller predators. Maybe so.

+

We want different things, he thinks. He talks to Nat, asks after Steve.

“Yup, he’s done. Gone forever.” Her lips curl around the word ‘forever’ with deliberate drama. She knows why he’s asking, and he’s glad at least one of them can be amused.

“But have you talked to him?” He barrels on.

“Of course,” she said. “We’re friends. You leave jobs, not people,” and if Bucky feels like her words are pointed at him, he doesn’t react at all.

“He hasn’t called me,” he says. Nat smiles at his petulance. “Weren’t we friends?”

Nat studies him. “I don’t know. Were you?”

+

“The fuck is this?” Hill says. The paper held between her finger trembles, as if in fear of her commanding voice.

“Letter of resignation,” Bucky says.

A decision he came to all on his own, kind of. Dr. Burke was happy, at least. Nat was annoyed, resigned. He hasn’t told Steve. Mostly because he can’t be sure why he’d be telling him. He wants to say it clean, with no hint of expectation. Maybe that will never be possible.

“That job was a cakewalk, Barnes. What, was the apartment that bad?”

Bucky shrugs. “I liked the crown molding.” And the company. And the view. And himself, liked himself more and more every day he spent with Steve, feeling for the first time since he was eighteen a kind of wholeness he hadn’t realized he’d missed.  

“What are you even going to do with yourself?” Maria rubs between her eyes. She drops the letter, glaring at it.

“I don’t know, find myself, maybe,” he said, honest. “I do have a surprising amount of skills, though.”

“First Rogers, now you,” she grumbles. “I’m gonna have to give Romanov a raise. Can’t lose all you fuckers to self-actualization.”

“She seems she’s happy enough where she is.”

Maria shakes her head, pushes the paper across the table. It slides to a stop, one corner hanging off the edge.

“Alright, give your two weeks, we’ll wrap it all up.” Her mouth twists in annoyance. “We can’t replace you. Every job we needed you for will need two or three more agents.”

“Appreciate it,” he said. “And thank you, you know, for everything.”

“I’d appreciate a bottle of Scotch more than the thanks.”

“Noted.”

And they’re done. He delivers a Lagavulin 12-year to her desk on his last day. He walks out, smiles at the agents who never warmed to him, and leaves the agency, a free man.

+

Steve texts him: _did you quit????_ on the burner phone. Which he kept. Bucky tries not to read into it, for all of a minute, but says ‘fuck it’ to himself, thinks about how Steve kept it around, kept it charged. It’s time to clarify a few things.  

And maybe he expects things. He lets himself expect things. It’s not a crime, wanting.

+

“You know what I figured out, after it all went down,” Steve says, drawing out the words. Their shots arrive, two whiskey on the smooth hardwood of the bar. They face each other, bodies turned toward one another on the black leather stools.

Bucky stares, intent on Steve’s face, and says nothing. Waiting. Patient.

“I kept thinking about it, one thing after another.”

Bucky furrows his brow in feigned confusion, but Steve knows he can’t know.

“Velveeta, Mongolian beef, sundried tomatoes…” Steve sets the words out there, lets them lie, exposed, on the table. “All those dinners that you didn’t let me cook. How you use the word ‘mouthfeel.’”

Genuinely confused now, Bucky says, “what the fuck, Steve.”

Steve pauses. He has an instinct for the dramatic, which he’ll never admit to.

“You’re a food snob.”

Bucky stills, starts, and barks a laugh. “So sue me, Rogers, I was a spy ten years. I got used to the finer things in life.”

His grin refuses to be suppressed, coaxes its twin out of Steve.

“That what you’ll do now, start a restaurant? Or worse, food truck?” Steve’s too amused for words. “Food critic, maybe?”

Bucky scoffs. “How do you even get that job.”

“Oh, no I have it—personal chef Bucky Barnes.” At his deadpan stare, Steve can’t help but needle him more. “I bet Tony has an opening.”

“Fuck you,” Bucky says with a widemouth grin.

“We live together two months, and it took me moving out to realize why you wouldn’t let me cook. I thought you were doing me favors, you know.”

“You asked how to cook an eggplant. Seriously, Steve, you fuckin chop it up and cook it.”

Steve grins. “Do you prefer gourmet or gourmand? I know that can be a sticking point for you people.”

“Jesus Christ,” Bucky says, running a hand over his face. “I just like food, alright.”

The bar bustles around them. Steve drinks deep, sets the empty glass on the bar with a thud. He knocks Bucky’s shoulder with his own. “You’re good at it, you know.”

“I do know, actually.” Bucky’s smile is fond, and when their eyes meet, it’s just like every morning over coffee, every dinner, every late night conversation that’s perfectly vulnerable in the face of the grand dark unknown.

Bucky wrote this down for himself, after therapy one recent day: It’s a terrifying thing, knowing you’d give them everything. Just ask—my whole being is there for the taking. There for your pleasure. Just ask.

Just ask.

“Are you sure we want different things?” Bucky asks, after the burn of his whiskey shot fades into loose limbs.

“Out of life? Or, what?” Maybe he doesn’t have that conversation memorized the way Bucky does. Or maybe he knows exactly what Bucky’s asking.

“It’s what you said. We want different things.” The expression on his face, the unblinking eyes, must give it away.

Steve swallows, and Bucky watches.

“Don’t we?”

Bucky reaches for his hand, strokes the pulse of his wrist with a thumb.

“I thought I missed the apartment, at first. Then, maybe the job. It felt real, more real than the other jobs I’d worked, living a real life. Cleaning my place. Buying groceries, cooking dinner. Picking up the dry cleaning.” His fingertips trace the long fine bones of Steve’s hand. The world beyond their share breath seems to still. Or rather, it drops away entirely.

“A long day’s work, and it felt like coming home.” The kiss he brushes Steve’s palm landed feather light. Steve’s hand curls close as if to hold it there forever.

His soft eyes implore Steve, who looks as if one word could shatter him.

“I always liked you, you know. Sure, everyone likes you. But I liked the way you wanted not to laugh at my jokes and couldn’t help it. I spent a long time not being human, then trying to prove it, that I could be real, could be trusted, and you I never had to prove anything to.”

Steve still says nothing. Might as well continue. In for a penny.

“And you know, I’ll take whatever it is that you’ll give. We can be just friends, and I’ll shut up about this forever, but you’re just too important—”

And Steve’s kissing him, soft lips teasing into his own, hands framing his face.  

“So that’s a yes then,” Bucky mumbles against Steve’s mouth.

“Sure feels like it,” Steve says, and kisses him deeper, longer.

"Why didn't you," Bucky mumbles against his lips, trailing off when Steve catches his bottom lip between his teeth.

They don't break away, even to finish; instead, they continue, words exchanged between breaths. 

"I didn't know," Steve says. "I wasn't sure."

His hands frame Bucky's face, tracing small circles on the skin behind his ears. 

"I wasn't either," Bucky says. "But you kept the phone, so."

Steve tries to duck his head, hide the dumb smile on his face, but he can't. He doesn't think he'll ever be able to hide it, anymore.

+

“I don’t want to be too forward,” Steve says, but Bucky interrupts him with a laugh.

“Yes, whatever you want, yes,” and kisses him more,a series of slow, languorous kisses that blend together, pushing him deep into the cushions of the couch of Steve’s apartment.

“I mean, maybe we should have dinner first?”

“We’ve had dinner, a million dinners, I made you dinner every night, almost.”

Steve laughs, his face flushed. “We don’t have to,” he says, but it’s clear he wants to.

Bucky watches him before answering, content to see the open, honest expression on Steve’s face, offering what Bucky had thought of for weeks.

He grins, and their twin smiles echo each other.

“Sure, yeah,” he says, kissing Steve’s cheek, his jaw, the spot beneath his ear that he’s wanted to kiss for weeks now. “But we should.”

He can feel the cackle in Steve’s body, and they sink deeper in the couch, wrapped up in slow, clutching hands and warm, coaxing lips.

+

Post-coitus, they lie there, panting.

“What are we gonna do with ourselves,” Steve says.

“I don’t know, whatever normal people do. Get smoothies, or something?”

Steve rolls him over with a laugh, showering kisses on his face like rain. “Whatever we want, I guess.” It's a lovely thought.

 ****  
  


**Author's Note:**

> This started as something silly and fluffy, and became weird and melancholy.
> 
> Come find me on tumblr! I'm [ twinagonies](http://twinagonies.tumblr.com).


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